Famous Maltese Journalist and Blogger Dies in Car Bomb Attack

MaltesebloggerDaphne Caruana Galizia, who accused her country's government of corruption, has been the victim of a bomb placed under her car, world media reported.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat made a televised statement in which he described the murder as a "barbaric assault on media freedom" and promised that the culprits would be punished. "Our country deserves justice," Muscat stressed, calling for national unity.

Her blog was so popular and influential that she contributed to the outbreak of a political crisis. Earlier this year, the popular blogger said a company mentioned in the Panama files named Eregent is owned by Michel Muscat, the wife of the prime minister. According to Galizia, Muscat's wife has received money from the daughter of the Azerbaijani president through a company set up by Mossak Fonseca, the law firm that was at the center of the Panama dossier scandal.

Both Muscat and his wife denied the accusations, and the prime minister announced early elections in which he was reelected. Half an hour before the death of 53-year-old Daphne Caruana Galizia, her last post on her blog was released, where the head of the prime minister's office is accused of corruption.

The European edition of the Politiko news site recently included Daphne Caruana Galizia in a list of 28 people who "form and shake Europe". The site called her a "blogger fury," and said she did herself as much as the entire WikiLeaks with her revelations about corruption and burglary, the New York Times notes.

Today Julian Assange announced a USD 20,000 award for information that would help to uncover the killers. Visits to the blog created by Galizia in 2008 sometimes reached 400,000, which is almost as much as the population of Malta, the newspaper writes, and notes that she had recently notified the police of threats she received. The posts of this blogger often had more readers than all the Maltese newspapers put together, the Guardian wrote. Her articles were a thorn in the eyes of the political leadership and the people of the criminal world with an influence in the smallest member of the EU.

Galizia stated that she was not politically bound. She wrote on a variety of topics - money laundering banks, links between the Maltese online gambling industry and the Mafia. One of her latest revelations concern Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and two of his closest associates in affairs with related offshore companies, sales of Maltese passports and payments by the Azerbaijan government.

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